Luka and the Fire of Life (18 page)

He could hear noises such as he had never heard in his life: the shriek of a falcon, the hiss of a snake, the roar of a lion, the burning of the sun, all magnified beyond imagining and almost beyond endurance, the war cries of the gods. The Changer Gyara-Jinn in the form of the King of Horses whinnied, neighed, stamped her (or, for the moment, his) eight feet in response, and the intruders concealed between her (or, for the moment, his) legs shook and cringed. Luka didn’t like to imagine how Bear and Dog were feeling. Underneath a horse, wedged in between its legs, was no place for a dog, or a bear. There must be a certain loss of pride involved, and he was upset to be the reason for their feelings of shame. He was leading them into great danger, too, he knew that, but he had to close his mind to that thought if he was to stand any chance of doing what needed to be done. ‘
I am exploiting their love and loyalty
,’ he
thought. ‘
It seems there is no such thing as a purely good deed, a completely right action. Even this task, which I took on for the very best of reasons, involves making choices that are not that “good”, choices that might even be “wrong”
.’

In his mind’s eye he saw again the faces of Queen Soraya and the Memory Birds, as they had looked when he said his farewells. Their eyes were moist with tears, and he knew it was because they feared they would never see him again. To this thought, too, he needed to close his mind. He was going to prove them all wrong. If a thing had never been done before, that only meant it was still waiting for the one who could pull it off. ‘
See how narrow I have become
,’ he thought. ‘
I have turned myself into a single, inevitable thing. I am an arrow speeding towards a target. Nothing must deflect me from my chosen course
.’

Somewhere in the sky up above him were Nuthog, Badlo and Sara, flying in formation in their dragon incarnations. There was no turning back now. The seven of them had entered the inner sanctum of the Aalim with crime in their hearts. The country below them was filled with wonders, but there was no time for sightseeing. All his life, ever since Rashid Khalifa started telling him stories, Luka had wondered about the Torrent of Words that fell to Earth from the Sea of Stories, which was up above the world on its invisible second moon. What would that look like, that waterfall tumbling from space? It must be wonderful to behold. Surely it would splash like an explosion into the Lake of Wisdom? Yet Rashid had always said that the Lake of Wisdom was calm and still, because Wisdom could absorb even the largest Rush of Words without being disturbed. There at the Lake it was always dawn. The long, pale fingers
of the First Light rested quietly on the surface of the waters, and the silver sun peeped over the horizon but did not rise. The Aalim who controlled Time had chosen to live at the Beginning of it for ever. Luka could close his eyes and see it all, he could listen and hear his father’s voice describing the scene, but now that he was actually there it was very frustrating not to be able to take a look.

And where was Nobodaddy? ‘Still Noplace to be seen,’ thought Luka, who was surer with every passing minute that the missing phantom was up to no good, wherever he was. ‘I will have to face him before the end, I’m sure of that,’ he thought, ‘and it isn’t going to be easy, but if he thinks I’ll give up my dad to him without a fight, he’s going to be very much surprised.’ Then he was struck, as if by a powerful fist, by the worst thought in the world. ‘
Had Nobodaddy gone because Rashid Khalifa had already … already … had finally … before Luka could save him … gone, too? Had the phantom who was absorbing his father vanished because its purpose had been achieved? Was all of this in vain
?’ Luka began to tremble at the thought and his eyes grew wet and prickly and grief began to flood over him in great shuddering waves.

But then something happened. Luka became aware of a change within himself. He felt as if something more powerful than his own nature had taken control of him, some will stronger than his own that was refusing to accept the worst. No, Rashid’s life was not over. It could not be, therefore it was not. The will-stronger-than-Luka’s-own rejected that possibility. Nor would it allow Luka to give up, to flinch in the face of danger or cower in the face of terror. This new force that had gripped
him was giving him the strength and courage he would need if he was going to do what needed to be done. It felt like something not-himself, something from
outside
, and yet he also knew that it was coming from within him, that it was his own strength, his own determination, his own refusal of defeat, his own strong will. For this, too, Rashid Khalifa’s storytelling, the Shah of Blah’s many tales of young heroes finding extra resources within themselves in the face of horrible adversity, had prepared him. ‘We don’t know the answers to the great questions of who we are and what we are capable of,’ Rashid liked to say, ‘until the questions are asked. Then and only then do we know if we can answer them, or not.’

And above and beyond Rashid’s stories lay the example of Luka’s brother Haroun, who had found such an answer in himself, afloat on the Sea of Stories, once upon a time. ‘I wish my brother was here to help me,’ Luka thought, ‘but he isn’t, not really, even though Dog the bear is speaking in his voice and trying to take care of me. So I’m going to do what he would have done. I’m not going to lose.’

‘
The Aalim are set in their ways and dislike people who try to rock the boat
,’ Rashid Khalifa had told the sleepy Luka one night. ‘
Their view of Time is strict and inflexible: yesterday, then today, then tomorrow, tick, tock, tick. They are like robots marching along to the beat of the disappearing seconds. What Was, Jo-Hua, lives in the Past; What Is, Jo-Hai, simply is right now; and What Will Come, Jo-Aiga, belongs to a place we cannot go. Their Time is a prison, they are the jailers, and the seconds and minutes are its walls.

‘
Dreams are the Aalim’s enemies, because in dreams the Laws of
Time disappear. We know – don’t we know, Luka? – that the Aalim’s Laws do not tell the truth about Time. The time of our feelings is not the same as the time of the clocks. We know that when we are excited by what we are doing, Time speeds up, and when we are bored, it slows down. We know that at moments of great excitement or anticipation, at wonderful moments, Time can stand still.

‘
Our dreams are the real truths – our fancies, the knowledge of our hearts. We know that Time is a River, not a clock, and that it can flow the wrong way, so that the world becomes more backward instead of less, and that it can jump sideways, so that everything changes in an instant. We know that the River of Time can loop and twist and carry us back to yesterday or forwards to the day after tomorrow.

‘
There are places in the world where nothing ever happens, and Time stops moving altogether. There are those of us who go on being seventeen years old all our life, and never grow up. There are others who are miserable old wretches, maybe sixty or seventy years old, from the day they are born.

‘
We know that when we fall in love, Time ceases to exist, and we also know that Time can repeat itself, so that you can be stuck in one day for the whole of your life.

‘
We know that Time is not only Itself, but is an aspect of Movement and Space. Imagine two boys, let’s say you and young Ratshit, who both wear wristwatches that are perfectly synchronised, and that both keep perfect Time. Now imagine that that lazy rascal Ratshit sits in the same place, let’s say right here, for one hundred years, while you run, never resting, all the way to school and back here again, over and over, also for one hundred years. At the end of that century, both your watches would have kept perfect Time, but your watch would be six or seven seconds slower than his.

‘There are those of us who learn to live completely in the moment. For such people the Past vanishes and the Future loses meaning. There is only the Present, which means that two of the three Aalim are surplus to requirements. And then there are those of us who are trapped in yesterdays, in the memory of a lost love, or a childhood home, or a dreadful crime. And some people live only for a better tomorrow; for them the Past ceases to exist.

‘I’ve spent my life telling people that this is the truth about Time, and that the Aalim’s clocks tell lies. So naturally the Aalim are my mortal enemies, which is just fine, because as a matter of fact I am their deadly foe.’

The Changer Gyara-Jinn stopped galloping, slowed down to a walk, then stopped completely and began to change. The giant eight-legged horse started becoming smaller; its hairy skin vanished and was replaced by a smooth shiny surface; the smell of horse faded away and Luka’s nostrils were filled, instead, by the far less palatable odour of the pigpen. Finally the eight legs became four, so that Luka, Bear and Dog slipped out of their bindings and tumbled what was now only a short distance to the admittedly stony ground. Gyara-Jinn’s once-in-a-lifetime transformation into the King of Horses had come to an end, and she was a tin sow once again. But Luka wasn’t paying any attention to that dramatic Change, because he was staring open-mouthed at the heart-stopping sight he had come so far to see. He was standing at the foot of the vast massif of the Mountain of Knowledge, and just a few feet away, lapping at the Mountain’s feet, was the Lake of Wisdom itself, its water clear, pure and transparent in the pale, silvery light of the Dawn
of Days, which never brightened into morning. Cool shadows stretched across the water, as always, caressing and smoothing it. It was a ghostly scene, at once haunted and haunting, and it was easy to imagine music in the air, a tinkling crystal melody: the legendary Music of the Spheres that had played when the World was born.

The Shah of Blah’s description of the Lake and its inhabitants, which Luka had heard so often that he knew it by heart, proved to be startlingly accurate. Shining schools of little canny-fish could be seen below the surface, as well as the brightly coloured smartipans, and the duller, deep-water shrewds. Flying low over the water’s surface were the hunter birds, the large pelican-billed scholarias and the bald, bearded, long-beaked guroos. Long tendrils of the lake-floor plant called sagacity were visible waving in the depths, and Luka recognised the Lake’s little groups of islands, too, the Theories with their wild, improbable growths, the tangled forests and ivory towers of the Philosophisles, and the bare Facts. In the distance was what Luka had longed to behold, the Torrent of Words, the miracle of miracles, the grand waterfall that tumbled down from the clouds and linked the World of Magic to the Moon of the Great Story Sea up above.

They had given the hunters the slip and arrived at the notorious South Face of Knowledge without being caught, but looming above Luka was an obstacle far more forbidding than he had imagined, the sheer cliff of the Mountain, a rugged wall of black stone upon which no plant had managed to find a foothold. ‘If a plant can’t do it, how can I?’ Luka wondered in dismay. ‘What sort of mountain is this, anyway?’

He knew the answer. It was the Magic Mountain, and it knew how to protect itself. ‘Knowledge is both a delight and an explosive minefield; both a liberation and a trap,’ Rashid used to say. ‘The way to Knowledge shifts and changes as the world changes and shifts. One day it is open and available to all, the next it is closed and guarded. Some people skip up that Mountain as if it were a grassy slope in a park. For others it is an impassable Wall.’ Luka scratched the top of his head, just the way his father liked to do. ‘I guess I’m one of the others,’ he thought, ‘because that doesn’t look like any grassy slope I’ve ever seen.’ To be blunt, the Mountain looked impossible to climb without serious mountaineering equipment, to say nothing of the proper training, and Luka lacked both. Somewhere above him, at the top of that world of stone, the Fire of Life burned in a temple, and there was no way of knowing where that cave might be, or how to go about finding it. Luka’s principal advisers were no longer at his side. Queen Soraya of Ott had not crossed the Rainbow Bridge, and the much less trustworthy (but formidably well informed) Nobodaddy had evidently decided –
for whatever reason, and no not that one!
– to withdraw his support.

‘Might I remind you,’ said the voice of Nuthog, in gentle tones, ‘that you do still have help available, and that that help possesses – may I point out? –
wings
.’

Nuthog, Badlo and Sara were still in dragon-mode, and Jinn quickly dragonised herself as well. ‘With four fast dragons at your service you should be able to reach the Fire Temple quickly enough,’ Nuthog said. ‘Particularly if those four fast dragons happen to know where on the summit the Temple actually is.’

‘To know approximately,’ said Badlo, rather more modestly.

‘We think, anyway,’ said Sara, and that didn’t sound convincing at all.

‘At any rate,’ added Jinn, more helpfully, ‘before we get going, it would probably be a good idea if you punched …
that
.’

That
was a silver knob embedded in the stone wall of the South Face. ‘It looks like a saving point,’ Luka said, ‘but why is it silver, not gold?’

‘The gold button is in the Temple,’ said Nuthog. ‘But at least you can save the progress you’ve made so far. And be careful. From now on, every mistake you make could cost you a hundred lives.’

That was alarming, Luka thought as he punched the silver button. It left almost no room for mistakes. Four hundred and sixty-five lives allowed him four slip-ups, maximum. Besides, while Nuthog’s offer of flying him up to his goal was certainly generous, and practical, too, Luka clearly remembered his father’s words about the Mountain of Knowledge: ‘If you want to reach the summit of the Mountain and discover the Fire of Life, you must make the final ascent alone. The Heights of Knowledge are reached only if you earn the right to do so. You have to put in the hard work. You can’t cheat your way to the Top.’ He had said something else after that, and Luka remembered thinking that that last bit was the really important part, but he couldn’t call it to mind. ‘That’s the trouble,’ he thought, ‘with being told all this stuff at night, when you’re always dead tired and falling asleep.’